The desire for sons has created
a severe shortage of marriageable young women. As their value rises,
unscrupulous men are trading them around the subcontinent and beyond
as if they were a mere commodity

Tripla's parents sold her
for £170 to a man who had come looking for a wife. He took her
away with him, hundreds of miles across India, to the villages outside
Delhi. It was the last time she would see her home. For six months,
she lived with him in the village, although there was never any formal
marriage. Then, two weeks ago, her husband, Ajmer Singh, ordered her
to sleep with his brother, who could not find a wife. When Tripla refused,
he took her into the fields and beheaded her with a sickle.

When Rishi Kant, an Indian
human rights campaigner, tracked down Tripla's parents in the state
of Jharkhand and told them the news, her mother broke down in tears.
"But what could we do?" she asked him. "We are facing
so much poverty we had no choice but to sell her."

Tripla was a victim of the
common practice in India of aborting baby girls because parents only
want boys. Although she was born and lived into early adulthood, it
was the abortions that caused her death. In the villages of Haryana,
just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that
the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men
have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25
miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of
Delhi is a slave market for women.

Last week, an Indian doctor
became the first to be jailed for telling a woman the sex of her unborn
baby. India is trying to stamp out the practice of female foeticide.
But in the villages of Haryana, the damage has already been done. Indian
parents want boys because girls are seen as a heavy financial burden:
the parents have to provide an expensive dowry for their weddings, while
sons will bring money into the family when they marry, and have better
job prospects.

But in Haryana, so many female
foetuses have been aborted that there aren't enough women for the men
to marry. The result is a thriving market in women, known in local slang
as baros, who have been bought from poorer parts of India. Anyone in
the villages can tell you the going rates. The price ranges from 3,000
rupees (£40) to 30,000 rupees for a particularly beautiful woman.
Skin colour and age are important pricing criteria. So is whether the
woman is a virgin.

When the police arrested
Tripla's husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally,
there is no real marriage. The women are sexual "brides" only.
Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them.
Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful
bride will sell her at a profit.

Munnia was sold when she
was only 17. Considered particularly beautiful, she was resold three
times in the space of a few weeks. Like Tripla, she came from Jharkhand,
but she was lucky: she escaped. Today she is in a government shelter
for women. As she tells her story, she breaks down in tears several
times.

"My father sold me to
a man called Dharma," she says. "I don't know if he paid for
me or not. I came to Delhi with my mother on the train, and then Dharma
took me to his village. He used to beat me very badly. He used to hit
me until I allowed him to sleep with me. Usually it went on for half
an hour."

She was with Dharma just
20 days before he sold her. Her route criss-crossed northern India:
Dharam took her to his home in Rajasthan, before selling her to a man
in Haryana. "He told me: 'I have sold you to a man for 30,000 rupees',"
she says. "But when we got there I realised that man wanted to
sell me on as well. Then I ran away."

She found a social worker
who helped her escape. In that she was fortunate: few of the women who
run away from the villages where she was make it out alive. Government
medical tests found she had been raped by two men. She was only 17 at
the time, and the age of consent in India is 18.

"My father told me Dharma
would marry me, but the marriage never took place," she says, blinking
in the sun. She is deeply traumatised by her experiences; all the time
she speaks, her hands play nervously with her shawl. When we ask if
she wants to go home, she says: "I don't know anything. I have
no will and no hope in this world."

She is the lucky one, all
the same. In the villages she escaped from, hundreds of women are trapped
in similar slave marriages. The village of Ghasera is a world away from
nearby Delhi. It is still walled, like a fortress from centuries ago,
and you enter through a narrow gateway. The roads are dirt and the houses
ramshackle huts: It is hard to believe you're just an hour and a half's
drive from the bright new India that is being courted as an ally by
the US and attracting investors from across the world. More than 100
brides have been imported to this village alone, according to locals.

The people are hostile and
crowd round strangers suspiciously. Even the police don't risk coming
in to these villages unarmed. Villagers have attacked police who tried
to rescue the brides, and set their cars on fire.

Anwari Katun was sold for
£130 and brought here from Jharkhand. The house she is living
in now is thick with flies, so many they make patterns in the air as
they swarm. A small girl is asleep in the corner, flies crawling over
her face.

Ms Katun wants to tell her
story, but the villagers crowd into her house and stand by menacingly
as she tries to speak. Her fear is evident as they stand by. Most prominent
is an old woman who moves forward threateningly when Ms Katun says she
is not happy. Cowed by the crowd she says: "I accept what happened
to me. I'm not happy but I accept it. This is a woman's life. The only
thing I want is that this doesn't happen to my sisters, that they never
get sold like this."

With that, she sits in silence.
Desperation is written on her face, but she is afraid to say any more
with the villagers crowding around. Once they are here, with no family
and no friends the women are helpless.

Rishi Kant has spent the
past four years rescuing women like Ms Katun. A jovial man in designer
sunglasses, he once spent four nights in Delhi's notorious Tihar jail
when police carried out mass arrests of protesters at a human rights
rally. His organisation, Shkati Vahini, has rescued more than 150 trafficked
women. But he says he can do nothing for Ms Katun at the moment. The
government women's shelter in Haryana state has places for only 25 women,
and it is full. When there is no space, he can do nothing: there is
nowhere else safe for the women to go. As soon as a place opens up,
he says, he will go back for Ms Katun.

To get the women out of the
villages, he has to enlist the help of the police. In villages such
as Ghasera, the police only raid in heavy numbers, and only in the middle
of the night, when they can take the villagers by surprise. Otherwise,
the heavily armed villagers will resist by force. But the police are
co-operative, and do get the women out. Then the long process of tracking
down their parents, and trying to get them home, if possible, begins.

Getting the women out of
the villages is often not easy. Recently, Mr Kant found a trafficked
woman who convinced him that the man who had brought her to Haryana
was running a business, and had several more women. He and the police
waited in the hope the woman could lead them to the trafficker. But
when they got back the next day, it appeared he had become suspicious.
The woman had disappeared. Mr Kant believes she was probably sold to
another part of India. He hasn't found any trace of her.

Many of the trafficked women
in the villages are minors. Shabila came to Ghasera from Assam, a thousand
miles away. She says she is 25, but she doesn't look a day over 15.
One of the women in the government shelter, Havari, looks the same age.
She is highly disturbed and talks at one moment of having had a baby,
then denies it the next. She has hacked off all her hair. There is no
psychiatric counselling for the women.

One of the women in Ghasera
told us her sister had been sold to the village along with her, then
kidnapped from it and exported to Oman. She was desperate for help to
get her out.

Some of the trafficked women
become traffickers themselves. Maryam, who was sold here from her native
Maharashtra in 1985, has just arranged the sale of another woman, Roxana,
to the village for 10,000 rupees. Although Ghasera is poor, it is better
off than many of the remote villages the women come from. With their
contacts there, the trafficked women can easily entice others to come
voluntarily. But once they come, there is no way out. Some of the women
become reconciled to their lives. Afsana speaks openly in front of her
husband of her unhappiness over the years here: she is not afraid of
him. Although there was no formal marriage, they have stayed together.

"I never thought I would
come here. I never even thought about where Haryana was," she says.
"There are several girls who do not want to stay, but what can
they do? They are in a helpless situation."

Her husband, Dawood, could
not get a wife locally because he has a damaged eye. He travelled to
Bihar and saw several women before choosing Afsana. He paid £40.
He complains that there aren't enough women in Haryana, but he does
not see the link between aborting female foetuses and the shortage of
women.

In Asouti, a village a short
drive away, you can find the reason behind all the suffering of the
slave brides of Haryana. Lakhmi Devi had five abortions, each because
the child she was carrying was a girl. She had already given birth to
four daughters.

She is still tortured by
guilt over the abortions. "It is better for a mother to die than
to kill her daughters," she says. "I was under immense pressure
from my husband's family to provide him with a son. My mother-in-law
even demanded I get another woman to sleep with my husband to give him
a son." Eventually, she gave birth to a boy, Praveen, and her agony
was over.

A recent study by Indian
and Canadian researchers found 500,000 girls are aborted every year
in India. Today Haryana has only 861 women for every 1,000 men. Strict
laws have been put in place to prevent the practice. Abortion is legal
in India but testing the gender of a foetus is not. Anil Singh, a Haryana
doctor, was sentenced last week to two years in prison for telling a
woman she was carrying a girl and offering an abortion.

But still, the abortions
go on. To get round the police, doctors have started using codes to
tell the people the sex of their baby: if the ultrasound report is written
in blue ink, it's a boy; if it's in red ink, it's a girl. If the report
is delivered on Monday, it's a boy, if it's Friday, it's a girl.

Meanwhile the trafficked
women keep coming, from across India, to fill the places of the unborn
women.

Tripla's parents sold her
for £170 to a man who had come looking for a wife. He took her
away with him, hundreds of miles across India, to the villages outside
Delhi. It was the last time she would see her home. For six months,
she lived with him in the village, although there was never any formal
marriage. Then, two weeks ago, her husband, Ajmer Singh, ordered her
to sleep with his brother, who could not find a wife. When Tripla refused,
he took her into the fields and beheaded her with a sickle.

When Rishi Kant, an Indian
human rights campaigner, tracked down Tripla's parents in the state
of Jharkhand and told them the news, her mother broke down in tears.
"But what could we do?" she asked him. "We are facing
so much poverty we had no choice but to sell her."

Tripla was a victim of the
common practice in India of aborting baby girls because parents only
want boys. Although she was born and lived into early adulthood, it
was the abortions that caused her death. In the villages of Haryana,
just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that
the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men
have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25
miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of
Delhi is a slave market for women.

Last week, an Indian doctor
became the first to be jailed for telling a woman the sex of her unborn
baby. India is trying to stamp out the practice of female foeticide.
But in the villages of Haryana, the damage has already been done. Indian
parents want boys because girls are seen as a heavy financial burden:
the parents have to provide an expensive dowry for their weddings, while
sons will bring money into the family when they marry, and have better
job prospects.

But in Haryana, so many female
foetuses have been aborted that there aren't enough women for the men
to marry. The result is a thriving market in women, known in local slang
as baros, who have been bought from poorer parts of India. Anyone in
the villages can tell you the going rates. The price ranges from 3,000
rupees (£40) to 30,000 rupees for a particularly beautiful woman.
Skin colour and age are important pricing criteria. So is whether the
woman is a virgin.

When the police arrested
Tripla's husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally,
there is no real marriage. The women are sexual "brides" only.
Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them.
Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful
bride will sell her at a profit.

Munnia was sold when she
was only 17. Considered particularly beautiful, she was resold three
times in the space of a few weeks. Like Tripla, she came from Jharkhand,
but she was lucky: she escaped. Today she is in a government shelter
for women. As she tells her story, she breaks down in tears several
times.

"My father sold me to
a man called Dharma," she says. "I don't know if he paid for
me or not. I came to Delhi with my mother on the train, and then Dharma
took me to his village. He used to beat me very badly. He used to hit
me until I allowed him to sleep with me. Usually it went on for half
an hour."

She was with Dharma just
20 days before he sold her. Her route criss-crossed northern India:
Dharam took her to his home in Rajasthan, before selling her to a man
in Haryana. "He told me: 'I have sold you to a man for 30,000 rupees',"
she says. "But when we got there I realised that man wanted to
sell me on as well. Then I ran away."

She found a social worker
who helped her escape. In that she was fortunate: few of the women who
run away from the villages where she was make it out alive. Government
medical tests found she had been raped by two men. She was only 17 at
the time, and the age of consent in India is 18.

"My father told me Dharma
would marry me, but the marriage never took place," she says, blinking
in the sun. She is deeply traumatised by her experiences; all the time
she speaks, her hands play nervously with her shawl. When we ask if
she wants to go home, she says: "I don't know anything. I have
no will and no hope in this world."

She is the lucky one, all
the same. In the villages she escaped from, hundreds of women are trapped
in similar slave marriages. The village of Ghasera is a world away from
nearby Delhi. It is still walled, like a fortress from centuries ago,
and you enter through a narrow gateway. The roads are dirt and the houses
ramshackle huts: It is hard to believe you're just an hour and a half's
drive from the bright new India that is being courted as an ally by
the US and attracting investors from across the world. More than 100
brides have been imported to this village alone, according to locals.

The people are hostile and
crowd round strangers suspiciously. Even the police don't risk coming
in to these villages unarmed. Villagers have attacked police who tried
to rescue the brides, and set their cars on fire.

Anwari Katun was sold for
£130 and brought here from Jharkhand. The house she is living
in now is thick with flies, so many they make patterns in the air as
they swarm. A small girl is asleep in the corner, flies crawling over
her face.

Ms Katun wants to tell her
story, but the villagers crowd into her house and stand by menacingly
as she tries to speak. Her fear is evident as they stand by. Most prominent
is an old woman who moves forward threateningly when Ms Katun says she
is not happy. Cowed by the crowd she says: "I accept what happened
to me. I'm not happy but I accept it. This is a woman's life. The only
thing I want is that this doesn't happen to my sisters, that they never
get sold like this."
With that, she sits in silence. Desperation is written on her face,
but she is afraid to say any more with the villagers crowding around.
Once they are here, with no family and no friends the women are helpless.

Rishi Kant has spent the
past four years rescuing women like Ms Katun. A jovial man in designer
sunglasses, he once spent four nights in Delhi's notorious Tihar jail
when police carried out mass arrests of protesters at a human rights
rally. His organisation, Shkati Vahini, has rescued more than 150 trafficked
women. But he says he can do nothing for Ms Katun at the moment. The
government women's shelter in Haryana state has places for only 25 women,
and it is full. When there is no space, he can do nothing: there is
nowhere else safe for the women to go. As soon as a place opens up,
he says, he will go back for Ms Katun.

To get the women out of the
villages, he has to enlist the help of the police. In villages such
as Ghasera, the police only raid in heavy numbers, and only in the middle
of the night, when they can take the villagers by surprise. Otherwise,
the heavily armed villagers will resist by force. But the police are
co-operative, and do get the women out. Then the long process of tracking
down their parents, and trying to get them home, if possible, begins.

Getting the women out of
the villages is often not easy. Recently, Mr Kant found a trafficked
woman who convinced him that the man who had brought her to Haryana
was running a business, and had several more women. He and the police
waited in the hope the woman could lead them to the trafficker. But
when they got back the next day, it appeared he had become suspicious.
The woman had disappeared. Mr Kant believes she was probably sold to
another part of India. He hasn't found any trace of her.

Many of the trafficked women
in the villages are minors. Shabila came to Ghasera from Assam, a thousand
miles away. She says she is 25, but she doesn't look a day over 15.
One of the women in the government shelter, Havari, looks the same age.
She is highly disturbed and talks at one moment of having had a baby,
then denies it the next. She has hacked off all her hair. There is no
psychiatric counselling for the women.

One of the women in Ghasera
told us her sister had been sold to the village along with her, then
kidnapped from it and exported to Oman. She was desperate for help to
get her out.

Some of the trafficked women
become traffickers themselves. Maryam, who was sold here from her native
Maharashtra in 1985, has just arranged the sale of another woman, Roxana,
to the village for 10,000 rupees. Although Ghasera is poor, it is better
off than many of the remote villages the women come from. With their
contacts there, the trafficked women can easily entice others to come
voluntarily. But once they come, there is no way out. Some of the women
become reconciled to their lives. Afsana speaks openly in front of her
husband of her unhappiness over the years here: she is not afraid of
him. Although there was no formal marriage, they have stayed together.

"I never thought I would
come here. I never even thought about where Haryana was," she says.
"There are several girls who do not want to stay, but what can
they do? They are in a helpless situation."

Her husband, Dawood, could
not get a wife locally because he has a damaged eye. He travelled to
Bihar and saw several women before choosing Afsana. He paid £40.
He complains that there aren't enough women in Haryana, but he does
not see the link between aborting female foetuses and the shortage of
women.

In Asouti, a village a short
drive away, you can find the reason behind all the suffering of the
slave brides of Haryana. Lakhmi Devi had five abortions, each because
the child she was carrying was a girl. She had already given birth to
four daughters.

She is still tortured by
guilt over the abortions. "It is better for a mother to die than
to kill her daughters," she says. "I was under immense pressure
from my husband's family to provide him with a son. My mother-in-law
even demanded I get another woman to sleep with my husband to give him
a son." Eventually, she gave birth to a boy, Praveen, and her agony
was over.

A recent study by Indian
and Canadian researchers found 500,000 girls are aborted every year
in India. Today Haryana has only 861 women for every 1,000 men. Strict
laws have been put in place to prevent the practice. Abortion is legal
in India but testing the gender of a foetus is not. Anil Singh, a Haryana
doctor, was sentenced last week to two years in prison for telling a
woman she was carrying a girl and offering an abortion.

But still, the abortions
go on. To get round the police, doctors have started using codes to
tell the people the sex of their baby: if the ultrasound report is written
in blue ink, it's a boy; if it's in red ink, it's a girl. If the report
is delivered on Monday, it's a boy, if it's Friday, it's a girl.

Meanwhile the trafficked
women keep coming, from across India, to fill the places of the unborn
women.